| Yury Melnichek | |
| Native Name: | Юрий Мельничек |
| Native Name Lang: | be |
| Birth Place: | Minsk, Belorussian SSR, Soviet Union |
| Education: | Belarusian State University |
| Occupation: | Tech entrepreneur, venture investor |
| Organization: | Melnichek Investments |
| Known For: | Co-founded MapsWithMe, Vochi and Melnichek Investments |
| Website: | http://melnichek.investments |
Yury Melnichek (Belarusian: Юрый Мельнічак, Russian: link=no|Юрий Мельничек) is a tech-entrepreneur, venture investor and software engineer. He was born in Minsk (Belarus), lived in Switzerland for more than 16 years and now lives in Cyprus. He was the founder of the free cartographic service MapsWithMe, AIMATTER company (mobile applications Fabby & Fabby Look, acquired by Google) and Vochi (mobile applications for video editing, acquired by Pinterest). In December 2021, together with Anna Melnichek, founded the investment company Melnichek Investments to invest in promising machine learning and biotech startups. Apart from investment activities, Yury provides consulting services in venture investment,[1] mobile applications marketing, and also provides consultancy services for IT-companies and startups working with machine learning, computer vision and data science.
Yury graduated with a degree in applied mathematics and informatics from the Belarusian State University in 2005[2]
Yury was a long-time partner of DOBRA Foundation and Social Weekend[3] – a social project competition, and the Open Data Science Belarus community.[4] He also takes part in hackathons as a mentor and speaks at tech conferences.
Melnichek Investments[5] is a Cyprus-based investment company founded by Yury Melnichek and Anna Melnichek in December 2021. Melnichek Investments[6] funds and supports machine learning and biotech startups, with the aim "to improve the quality of human lives". Melnichek Investments uses its owner's funds, sourced from previous successful startups acquisitions, to provide funding to AI startups in their pre-seed, seed, and A rounds.
In April 2019, Bulba Ventures, as a founding investor, launched the Vochi project together with Ilya Lesun[7] to create a “computer vision”-based video editing and effects app for smartphones. With the help of a computer vision-based video segmentation algorithm, the app let users apply effects to objects in their videos, opening up a lot of opportunities to make unique content.
In December 2021 the startup was acquired by Pinterest.[8]
In March 2018, Yury, together with his business partner Andrei Avsievich, founded startup investment company Bulba Ventures.[9] Bulba Ventures was focused on machine learning startups at the intersection of real economy & IT, life & health sciences.
Bulba Ventures has invested in such startups as: OneSoil[10] - a platform for precision farming; WANNABY, a startup at the intersection of e-commerce and augmented reality later acquired by Farfetch;[11] VOIR, a mobile application that gives users the capability to experiment with style and appearance, and FriendlyData, which is a startup that translates text from English into database query languages. In October 2018, FriendlyData was acquired by the American company ServiceNow.[12]
In February 2022, Melnichek and Avsievich announced that they were freezing joint investments within Bulba and would continue to operate separately.[13]
AIMATTER was founded in April 2016, and in Autumn 2016[14] launched a neural network-based AI platform and SDK to detect and process images quickly on mobile devices. This was the world's first technology working on mobile devices and in streaming video.[15]
The photo and video app Fabby served as a proof-of-concept of the tech. Fabby became popular among users and was highly reviewed by experts (the app twice became No.1 in its category on ProductHunt[16]). AIMATTER also developed hair segmentation technology during live-streaming video that was later introduced in the Fabby Look app.
In August 2017 TechCrunch[17] announced news about Google acquiring AIMATTER. The deal became remarkable for the Belarusian IT industry, because an international publicly trading company acquired a Belarusian legal entity. Terms of the sale were not disclosed.
Maps.me is a free cartographic service available on iOS, Android and Blackberry platforms. The company, initially called MapsWithMe, was founded in 2010 with the head office in Zurich and the R&D centre in Minsk. Yury launched the project together with Alexander Borsuk, Victor Govako and Sergey Retchiskiy. Before founding MapsWithMe Yury worked at Google[18] (cartographic service).[19]
MapsWithMe was first released on iOS in April 2011. In 2012, the service team won first prize at the StartupMonthly competition in Vilnius and won an internship in Silicon Valley. In February 2012, a new update of MapsWithMe was released for Android and in July 2014 the company was renamed to MAPS.ME.
In November 2014 MAPS.ME was acquired by Mail.ru Group[20] who were interested in preserving product independence within its structure and further development of MAPS.ME.
MAPS.ME acquisition garnered a lot of media attention and was featured among the most significant deals of Runet[21] (Lenta.ru, the Runet, VC.ru[22]). "Thanks to this deal, the popular cartographic service is now available for free". At the moment of the deal "the app was downloaded more than 7 million times, and it was one of the most popular in the “Travel” section in more than 100 countries".[23]